John Donne's Holy Sonnets have not endured because they are good "devotional" poetry.
Readers who turn to these poems expecting piety, guidance (however artful), or anything like
the varied spiritual perspective of George Herbert, for instance, are bound to be surprised or
disappointed. Donne's sonnets do not feature an everyman expressing typical Christian
problems or aspirations. Quite the contrary. A unique voice compels our attention, thrilling us
even before we understand precisely what it is saying, shattering the decorous bounds of
devotion with its force of expression. The immense aesthetic pleasure afforded by these poems
consists in large part of hearing a vivid and original voice that rings, as it considers religious
subjects, not with anything as feeble as piety, but with wit, energy, and drama. The same voice
animates the secular poems, and, from the beginning, it has been identified as the voice of John
Donne.

With the exception of biographers and cultural historians, who have linked the Holy
Sonnets to problems or periods in Donne's life,[1] most critics have avoided a discussion of their
interpretive methods or assumptions. Though a substantial number of scholars have read the
sonnets as descriptions of the poet's theology, their recourse to biography goes largely
unremarked, as if what Donne felt or believed were less personal than the events and
experiences that made up his life.[2] There are several reasons for the general repression of
biography, the first being a distrust of the old approach that saw every line as a little window
into the author's life or mind. Then there is our fondness for the New Criticism's "speaker," the
product of our own close reading. No less important has been our ignorance of the reading and
interpretive habits of the seventeenth century, to which is closely related our assumption that, as
part of his "dramatic" style, Donne created dramatic, by which we mean fictional, speakers.

Even if we want to broach the relation between the author and the voice the poems
create or communicate, the matter is complex. The first audience of individual sonnets was
Donne's coterie, a little world of readers who knew him personally and as love poet, satirist,
elegist, and all-around wit and courtier. Possibly, some readers have theorized, Donne
performed some of his poems before members of this coterie, interpreting (through demeanor,
gesture, or tone) lines or whole poems that admit of various interpretations in print. At any rate,
the qualities of verse written to a known and knowing audience helped to create something like
a dramatic voice, since knowledgeable readers could be counted on to recognize ironies,
exaggerations, and other signs of discrepancies between the actual writer and his poetic voice.
Still, this reading competence required the coterie's knowledge of Donne's character and
condition as the baseline against which to measure the accuracy or inaccuracy of his poetic self-projection. From members of Donne's coterie to the widening circle of acquaintance who
might have seen a copy of a sonnet to readers of the first and second editions of the poems,
Donne had contemporary readers with varying degrees of acquaintance with him (or with
none), with varying abilities to estimate how closely the poetic voice could be identified with the
author. But on the evidence of the 1633 and 1635 editions of Poems, By J. D. (the only
contemporary evidence available), seventeenth-century readers identified the voice of the
poems as Donne's.

The interpretive assumptions of these readers merit our attention, first, because they tell
us something about how Donne's contemporaries read poetry in general and Donne's in
particular. Of course, this knowledge does not enable us to read the sonnets as early-modern
people did; it does, however, reveal Donne's general expectation of how his verse would be
read. Since the poet and his first print audiences agreed in the belief that an author's writing is
his "emblem," my reading of the Holy Sonnets is an effort to describe the emblem Donne set
before his readers. I shall look first at the biographical assumptions of Donne and his
contemporaries. Then I shall summarize the current interest in reinserting the author into critical
discourse and show that the authorial "emblem" of the seventeenth century has a counterpart in
the "mask" or "persona" that is part of a present-day effort to redefine biographical criticism.
A reading of the Holy Sonnets will follow, focusing on Donne's poetics of credibility, which
depends on the persona of the Pauline striver, a mask Donne adopts as he turns from secular to
religious poetry. A contextualization that considers in detail the interpretive practice of Donne's
known readers, what we know about his career while he was composing some of the Holy
Sonnets, and the demands of writing for a coterie is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. My
aim is to sketch a reading of the Holy Sonnets that is nuanced by cultural as well as subjective
factors, and to contribute to the reconsideration of biography that other scholars have initiated
in Donne studies.

In the 1633 edition of Donne's poetry, Thomas Browne titled his elegy "To the
deceased Author, Upon the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser sort, with the
Religious," with "Promiscuous" referring to the mixture of secular and sacred poems that made
up the volume. The elegy declares that the poet's "Loose Raptures" express Donne's
"wantonnesse," his "Wanton Story," and his "Confession."[3] Browne interpreted literally the
convention that a book portrays its author, and he was not the only one to do so. "Jo. Mar.,"
probably John Marston, after calling Donne's "last preach'd, and printed Booke, / His Picture in
a sheet," and comparing it to the "Statue in a sheet of stone" in St. Paul's, concludes with praise
for Poems, by J. D.:

Those sheetes present him dead, these if you buy,
You have him living to Eternity.

Writing about Donne's love poems, Jasper Mayne also assumed that they represented the poet
and, specifically, his experiences in love. He advises "Poore Suburbe Wits" to "learne to
Court" from Donne, who could "move / A Cloystred coldnesse, or a Vestall love." Mayne
excuses himself for introducing this "low praise," which is "onely for [Donne's] yonger dayes."

Precisely because contemporaries believed the poetry portrayed Donne, the editor of
the second edition (probably Izaak Walton) deliberately created what he considered a more
accurate image. He sorted the poems (setting the familiar order in which the "Songs and
Sonnets" are far from the concluding "Divine Poems") and omitted Browne's tribute, probably
because the 1635 edition was no longer a "promiscuous" mixture. Besides, in its other
comments, Browne's poem stated what all thought but may not have wanted to emphasize, that
Donne's life was, in part at least, a "Wanton Story." The 1635 editor also added a
frontispiece picture of Donne as a youth with an epigram by Walton beneath it:

This was for youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit that Time
Most count their golden Age; but t'was not thine.
Thine was thy later yeares, so much refind
From youths Drosse, Mirth, and wit; as thy pure mind
Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise
Of thy Creator, in those last, best Dayes.
Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which begins
With Love; but endes, with Sighes, and Teares for sins.[4]

In referring to Donne's book as his "Emblem," Walton merely repeats more artfully what the
other poets had said: a direct relationship exists between Donne's life and his art. The poetry is
a representation, an image, of the poet. Since an "emblem" is more specifically "A drawing or
picture expressing a moral fable" (OED), Walton also underlines the moral hinted at in the arc of
Donne's life: beginning with the "Drosse" of love, it ends with "Teares for sins." The new
emblem created by the "new" book, and the new epigram all match; the book reflects the life.

The wholesale identification of Donne's poetry with his life may offend modern readers;
but the poet encouraged contemporaries to make the connection. In a sermon Donne
unequivocally linked his secular poetry with his youth at Lincoln's Inn: "I saw it was thought wit,
to make Sonnets of their own sinnes. . . . I sinn'd not for the pleasure I had in the sin, but for
the pride that I had to write feelingly of it."[5] As for the blatant editorial shaping of the 1635
edition, it is undeniably truer than the 1633 volume to the overall trajectory of Donne's life, in
which a racy youth was followed (eventually) by pious maturity. Moreover, Donne himself
promoted that view of his life when he referred in 1619 to Biathanatos as a "Book written by
Jack Donne, and not by D. Donne."[6] Thus he authorized the representation of his life as broken
into two distinct phases of youth and maturity, with his writing reflecting one phase or the other.
Long after Donne's and his memorialists' split characterization, other contemporaries referred
to the same pattern. In 1643, Richard Baker wrote about his "old
acquaintance,"

Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford, lived at the Innes of Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses; until such time as King James taking notice of the pregnancy
of his Wit, was a meanes that he betooke him to the study of Divinity.[7]

Except Browne, all of the aforementioned follow the Dean's lead in depicting his life as split into
a before-and-after pattern. Donne, Browne, Marston, Mayne, Walton, and Baker, all posit a
direct relationship between Donne's life and his art, interpreting his writing as his emblem or
representation. Some years later, writing in the poet's biography about his struggles before
taking Orders, Walton compared them to the strife preceding Augustine's conversion.[8]

Despite their acceptance of the pattern that divides life and poems so neatly in two,
contemporary readers were not naive about an author's self-presentation. Ben Jonson's "To
Heaven" addresses the seeming disjunction between the secular and devotional voices in his
poetry:

Good, and great God, can I not thinke of thee,
But it must, straight, my melancholy bee?
Is it interpreted in me disease,
That, laden with my sinnes, I seeke for ease?
O, be thou witnesse, that the reynes dost know,
And hearts of all, if I be sad for show,
And judge me after: if I dare pretend
To ought but grace, or ayme at other end.[9]

"To Heaven" is the sole religious poem in The Forest, and Jonson wrote only five others (two
appear in Epigrams and three in Underwood). Obviously Jonson's contemporaries did not
think of the playwright as a person likely to feel burdened by sin. Instead, the poet complains,
when he turns to God, people suspect that he is ill or feigns remorse for ulterior motives.
Jonson and his readers take for granted that he is the speaker of his poems. The poet wants
only to persuade them that he genuinely suffers the spiritual pain he claims.

If Jonson's poem indicates the general awareness that a poet can fake emotions or
concerns "for show," intending something other than his stated "ayme," other texts suggest that
when it came to devotional literature, poets and public were especially sensitive to the
connection between the author and his work. George Herbert was said to have characterized
The Temple as "a picture of the many spirituall Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my
Soul"; Nicholas Ferrar vouched that the book was the emblem of a man who was "a
companion to the primitive Saints, and a pattern or more for the age he lived in." A real or
seeming disjunction between author and theme, as in the case of Jonson or other secular poets
who turned to spiritual subjects, required circumspection. Thomas Carew, for instance,
complimenting George Sandys "on his translation of the Psalmes," assumed that readers would
identify him, Carew, not with his own metrical versions of the Psalms, but with his more typical
works; "My unwasht Muse, polutes not things Divine, / Nor mingles her prophaner notes with
thine." Praise requires Carew to assert the power of Sandys' work, but awareness of his own
reputation stops him from claiming that his friend's translations will transform him: "Who
knows," the poet speculates, but that his muse's "wandring eyes that run, / Now hunting Glow-wormes, may adore the Sun." Anything is possible.[10]

With its need to justify Jonson's poetic voice as the reflection of his actual life, "To
Heaven" implies the absence of a conception of a "speaker" akin to a dramatic personage
whom readers could infer from individual poems. Indeed, as Jonson and Donne's encomniasts
imply, unless early-modern readers were specifically informed to the contrary, they assumed
that the voice that spoke in a poem was the author's. Of course historical, biblical, or invented
characters spoke in verse. But these were identified in titles (like Jonson's "In the Person of
Womankind") or easily identifiable by differing obviously and radically (as in gender) from the
author.[11] Apart from such specific cases, readers identified the poet as the speaker of his poem
and, as "To Heaven" and the elegies on Donne indicate, they expected that the poem would
reflect, in some measure, the author's life and ethos. The Jonson and Carew poems further
imply the expectation that a writer's self-representation will conform to what readers consider
his characteristic traits, interests, and concerns. Jonson's protestations reveal the disbelief or
suspicion that could ensue when the poet's self-projection deviated substantially from its usual
appearance. "To Heaven" depicts the reaction that Donne, as a secular poet, could anticipate
when he turned to spiritual matters.

Given the seventeenth-century practice of reading poetry biographically and the fact
that Donne's first, coterie audience would have had particular expectations of this poet, the
emblem that he put before his readers in the Holy Sonnets, his most sustained mode of spiritual
expression, merits our attention. As we have seen, the before-and-after representation
promoted by the churchman in his late forties led contemporaries like Walton to make a sharp
division between secular and religious poems. But Walton "knew him [and his poetry] only in
later life,"[12] and the information we have about Donne's writing and life does not support an
abrupt, radical division. Whereas Walton imagined a diptych of contrasting emblems, a reading
that recognizes the pressures exerted by the sonnets' first audience, and their "mixture of
secular and religious intentions"[13] produces a more nuanced image.

I propose to read the Holy Sonnets as Walton and Donne's other elegists did, as
emblems of the author. But though my approach bears that resemblance to the unself-conscious practice of the poet's contemporaries, it is inspired by the current reconsideration of
biographical criticism. There is a growing recognition that biography is a form of history that it
is counterproductive to ignore, as Annabel Patterson remarked some time ago: "'Intertextuality'
. . . does not compare for interpretive rigor with the older concept of a poet's career, as the first
context with which any interpretation must engage."[14] Stanley Fish considers biography the
ineluctable foundation of interpretation. He argues that whether we focus on an individual
author or on one of the "transcendental anonymities" into which some critics believe the author
has dissolved, it is not possible to divorce "meaning . . . from questions of biography and
intention"[15] because all meaning is contextual:

The critic who decides to ignore Milton's religious views and treat Lycidas as a poem has not chosen against biography but rather has chosen one kind of biography over another. Instead of reading within the assumption of a religious intention that critic will be reading within the assumption of a poetic intention; the meanings he or she assigns will be meanings that could have been intended by a person who was working in a poetic tradition. (12)

But Fish does not suggest that we revert to a biographical approach that means "busy[ing]
ourselves with the day-to-day details" of the author's life (15), and I do not propose to read the
Holy Sonnets as if they were entries in Donne's spiritual diary or versified statements of his
theology.

Undoubtedly, historicism and cultural studies have renewed interest in issues that, until
recently, concerned only biographers, such as the relationships between literary works and the
personal and social life. But rather than narrowing the focus of interpretation to the individual
life and consciousness, these approaches broaden it outward from author and text to their
larger social contexts. These critical perspectives, encouraging awareness of the
embeddedness of texts in their milieux, have demonstrated the power of different kinds of
materials and contexts to expand our understanding. More than anything else in Donne studies,
Arthur Marotti's John Donne: Coterie Poet has been persuasive in reinforcing the
argument that "it is important to define the particular biographical and social contexts in which
[Donne's works] were composed and read" because the crucial knowledge that his coterie
brought to their reading is otherwise lost.[16]

The tenets of a new biographical approach will continue to emerge as more scholars
see the desirability of reconstituting authors (together with their cultural contexts) for the sake of
better understanding literary texts. Curiously, however, a recent version of biographical
criticism has an intriguing similarity to the approach that we inferred from the comments of
Donne's contemporaries. "Persona criticism," which Cheryl Walker defines in her feminist
reading of Elinor Wylie, adapts the old term "persona" to mean "a mask that may be related
simultaneously to the biographical data available about the author and to other cultural and
literary voices."[17] A persona, that is, is a culturally significant figure available to the various
artists and people of the same time and place (114). For example, other seventeenth-century
people might have cast themselves or others in the Augustinian persona that Walton eventually
claimed for Donne in his biography: it was a persona imbued with significance for the whole
spiritually-informed culture. Walker points out that a mask is superior to a human being as an
object of analysis because the mask

is limited, identifiable, constructed, and without intentions. . . .[T]he persona is almost
precisely opposite to the historical subject-author in that it functions like an outline, a
potentiality, rather than a fulness. (115)

Persona criticism proceeds first by identifying the characteristics of the author-mask in the
literary works under analysis; subsequently, it explores "the way these effects (this voice or
character) come out of a particular time and place at the intersection of psychological and
cultural history" (114).

Obviously, persona criticism is similar to the seventeenth-century practice of identifying
the author with the emblem, the representation or persona that emerges from the literary work.
But the differences between the old assumptions and the new biographical strategy are crucial.
Walton and his contemporaries considered the emblem a more or less realistic representation of
the actual person; Walker emphasizes that the persona is a construct and a figure with cultural
as well as individual significance. Thus defining the mask moves it beyond questions of
"sincerity" and beyond the limitations of the merely personal. In not privileging individual
subjectivity over historical and cultural contexts, persona criticism, like Marotti's historicist-cultural approach, is an important modification of a simpler biographical criticism. It, too,
argues the necessity of identifying "the circumstances that govern relations between authors and
texts."[18] Where Marotti reads the poems as "rhetorical enactments of [Donne's] relationships
to peers and superiors,"[19] I am interested here in the mask Donne presents to his readers in the
specific circumstances of departing from his secular poetic persona.

Marotti has written about the shifting status of religious verse in the reign of James and
about the particulars of Donne's situation that probably inspired him to turn to sacred poetry
even as he still sought secular preferment. He concedes that the religious poems "no doubt
express Donne's private, psychological, religious, and moral struggles."[20]
But, reminding us that
the poet wrote secular and religious works during the same period (182), and apprising us that
he used some sonnets to try to win patronage (245), he gives equal weight to the poems' social
aspect: "Like Donne's other coterie writings, the Holy Sonnets are witty performances that
exploited a knowledgeable audience's awareness of their author's personal situation and
history" (251). At the same time that Donne exploited his first audience's knowledge of
himself, his circle's knowledge presented him with a challenge as he shifted from a decidedly
worldly to a spiritual perspective. The nature of the Holy Sonnets was dictated, at least in part,
by Donne's need to account for a self-representation that differed from his earlier written
selves. To negotiate the transition, Donne fashioned a poetics of credibility whose linchpin is
the mask of the Pauline striver, a figure that combines a great sense of sinfulness with an
effortful spirituality based on fear.

Donne might have been describing his own poetic practice in a sermon preached to
Queen Anne at Denmark-House in 1617:

[T]he Prophets, and the other Secretaries of the holy Ghost in penning the books of Scriptures, do for the most part retain, and express in their writings some impressions, and some air of their former professions . . . And, according to this Rule
too, Salomon, whose disposition was amorous, and excessive in the love of women, when
he turn'd to God, he departed not utterly from his old phrase and language, but having
put a new, and a spiritual tincture, and form and habit into all his thoughts, and words, he
conveys all his loving approaches and applications to God.[21]

The poet "whose disposition was amorous" fashions a poetics for the Holy Sonnets that
emphasizes their stylistic and moral continuities with his secular and other sacred poems. This
consistency amidst a great change is Donne's subtle assertion that the spiritual poems represent
him accurately.

Similarities of style, tone, and taste link the secular and divine poems, mitigating
potential readerly unease about the change in Donne's subject matter. The poet declares in
"Oh, to vex me" that the voice heard by God and his past mistresses is the same, an easily
verifiable claim. In "If poysonous mineralls," Donne disputes with God as readily as he argues
with lovers and others in the secular poems. "Batter my heart" features the imperious tone
characteristic of such poems as "The Sunne Rising." Like some of the secular poems, some of
the sonnets seem to be purely intellectual exercises, albeit in dramatic form: "This is my playes
last scene" and "Death be not proud" give different answers to the question of whether death is
fearful. The love of paradox is equally prominent in the secular and divine poems: "Why are
wee by all creatures" seems to answer "If poysonous mineralls" and both, together with "Spit in
my face," explore the paradox of a god who dies for his unworthy creatures. Perhaps most
tellingly, the shock tactics deployed in some elegies and satires also feature in the Holy
Sonnets. "Spit in my face," for instance, finds Donne painting himself as a sinful Jesus,
deserving crucifixion, before he settles for being the lone crucifier of the savior. "Show me
deare Christ" shows Donne's penchant for conflating the sacred and the amorous in imagery
that casts the Church as a loose woman.

In seven of the Holy Sonnets, Donne points deliberately to another of his literary
masks. The poet remembers the "fire / Of lust" and his words to "profane mistresses" ("I am a
little world"; "What if this present").[22] Now he laments the tears wasted in past idolatry ("O
might those sighes"). But though he knows how "idolatrous lovers weepe and mourne" ("If
faithfull soules"), he admits that his "amorous soul" ("Show me deare Christ") was led to divine
love by the earthly variety ("Since she whome I lov'd"). But the connection between sacred
and "profane Love" is not always so beneficial, according to "Oh, to vex me." Moreover, the
Christian persists in familiar but inappropriate attitudes. An annoyed Donne admits in "Oh, to
vex me," for example, that sensually- or spiritually-motivated, he is the same lover: his "ridlingly
distemperd" emotions and his strategies remain what they always were. In "O might those
sighes," he complains that as he suffered in idolatrous love, so he suffers in its holy counterpart.
Although the poem describes a radical shift in orientation, readers familiar with Donne's secular
poetry would not see a drastic change in the tone of his emotional life.

Presenting himself in the Holy Sonnets as the same (literary) character he always was,
Donne offers the continuities linking his authorial self-projections as his spiritual bona fides. The
spirited approach and the heightened, volatile emotions are the same in the service of sensual or
divine love because he is the same person, the poet assures his reader. John Chudleigh, whose
elegy appeared in the 1635 edition of the Poems, makes some astute observations:

He kept his loves, but not his objects; wit
Hee did not banish, but transplanted it,
Taught it his place and use, and brought it home
To Pietie, which it doth best become;
He shew'd us how for sinnes we ought to sigh,
And how to sing Christs Epithalamy:
The Altars had his fires, and there hee spoke
Incense of loves, and fansies holy smoake.[23]

Between his references to sighing, singing, and speaking, it is unclear whether Chudleigh refers
to Donne's prose, sermons, or poetry. Finally, it does not matter because his subject is
Donne's consistency. Beneath the seemingly radical change from love poet to priest, the elegist
discerns the same fiery personality. Chudleigh, clearly noting the continuities of style, tone, and
perspective that mark all the work, secular or religious, interprets Donne's poetics of credibility
as a sign of sincerity.

The Pauline striver is often the speaker of Donne's Holy Sonnets, combining a great
sense of sinfulness with an effortful spirituality based on fear. Glancing back to a sensual
perspective or straining toward a livelier faith, the Holy Sonnets document Donne's fitful shift
from the natural man to the Pauline striver who "works out his own salvation in fear and
trembling" (Phil. 2:12). Paul uses the last phrase four times to describe the Christian's proper
attitude before his master.[24] In Philippians, he follows his recommendation of the effort it
behooves Christians to make with the emphatic admission that he himself has not "already
attained," is not "already perfect," as he presses "toward the mark for the prize of the high
calling of God" (Phil. 3:12-14). In Donne's Holy Sonnets, the combination of acknowledged
imperfection and strenuous effort prompted by a cultivated fear forms the pattern of the Pauline
striver, a credible mask for the poet whose previous self-projection was "wanton."

The Holy Sonnets are not the poems of a mature Christian who consistently abhors, or
absolutely renounces, sin. Over and over, declaring that the devil "usurpes" and "ravishes" his
weak soul, the Pauline persona worries about his imperfection and instability. In spite of
himself, the poet confesses, he betrays himself and is likely to act in his usual sinful way. The
cunningly-made "little world" has been burned by "the fire / Of lust and envie" (10-11), and its
flames have still not retired. "Teach mee how to repent," he cries in "At the round earths
imagin'd corners" (13). He knows that, lacking firmness, he will "soone despaire" if help is not
forthcoming ("As due by many titles," 12). The rhetorical fireworks of a poem like "Batter my
heart" may obscure Donne's disappointed admissions that he is unable to give himself to God
and that his repentant grief is not felt very keenly.

Donne does not make excessive demands on readers' credulity regarding the origin of
his spirituality, either. Though he gives himself credit for "valiantly" overstriding "hels wide
mouth" (4) in "If faithfull soules," for example, he admits at the same time that the outward
"circumstances and . . . signes" (6) of his life would not necessarily lead others to predict such a
fate for him. Some kind of conversion experience may be implicit when an "idolatrous lover"
changes spiritual direction, but Donne is prosaic in this regard. The Holy Sonnets, when they
allude (however indirectly) to their genesis, indicate a circumstantial spirituality created by
external events and capable mostly of showing the poet the desirability of changing his life.
"Sickness, deaths herald" ignites his fear, and therefore his interest in repentance, according to
"Oh my blacke Soule," "This is my playes last scene," and "Thou hast made me."

Donne's chief concern in these extravagantly emotional sonnets is -- paradoxically -- a tepid spirituality. In "Oh my blacke Soule," for instance, illness exposes
him as an evildoer who fears imminent punishment. Though he acknowledges insufficient
contrition, he is incapable of doing as he knows he should. In "Spit in my face," the poet
describes feeling simultaneously like a grievous sinner deserving crucifixion and a willing
crucifier who does not sufficiently value the redemptive love of God. Appropriately, the Pauline
striver fights his perceived lack of fervor with soliloquy, the devotional method of self-exhortation, and with the deliberate cultivation of holy fear. "Soliloquy[,] . . . a preaching to
ones self," in Richard Baxter's succinct definition,[25] is Donne's most constant strategy in his
struggles against indifference. The frequency with which he resorts to this devotional method
reveals the extent to which he gauges his devotion as lukewarm.

"Why are wee by all creatures" and "What if this present" are efforts to generate
gratitude. Calling up images of the tear-filled eyes and bloody frowns of Christ in the latter
poem, Donne conveys his perception of blunted sensibilities. The memory of "profane
mistresses" (10) as he deliberately envisions the crucified savior, confirms that he is not ready
for the "worlds last night," not altogether persuaded that the picture of Christ crucified is a
beautiful sight. "Wilt thou love God" addresses the poet's perceived failure to love God
enough. Conscientiously, almost ploddingly, he sets himself to work, meditating on the triune
God, one person at a time, in order to emphasize how much God loves him. Donne's self-exhortations, efforts to excite his emotions, convey distress about what he characterizes as his
spiritual superficiality. He judges as inadequate his feelings of contrition, repentance, gratitude,
and love.

Seven sonnets show Donne working to rouse his sluggish devotion by cultivating holy
fear: "Oh my black Soule," "This is my playes last scene," "At the round earths imagin'd
corners," "What if this present," "Thou hast made me," "I am a little world," and "Oh, to vex
me." Responding directly to the Pauline injunction to "work out your own salvation with fear
and trembling," these are powerful poems. Occasionally, however, their deliberate melodrama
and sensationalism seem suspect and a purely rhetorical heat exposes the gap between effort
and genuine devotion. "Thou hast made me," for instance, is overloaded with kinetic
metaphors -- running, freezing in immobility, falling, rising, and floating or flying, the poet seems
too busy to be devout. Seen as exercises in the cultivation of "right fear," however, these
sonnets take on a different complexion. In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Christian asks
Hope about men like Ignorance, who do not go on pilgrimage: "Have they at no time . . .
convictions of sin, and so consequently fears that their state is dangerous?" Stressing that fear
can lead people to make a start in faith, Hope answers that it "tends much to men's good, and
to make them right at their beginning to go on Pilgrimage." The "right fear," as Christian
explains, "is caused by saving convictions for sin"; "it driveth the soul to lay fast hold of Christ
for salvation"; and "it makes the soul afraid to turn from God, his Words and Ways."[26] The
capacity of fear to call people to faith is so important that Christian warns against any inclination
to avoid it. The ignorant who try to stifle it will backslide. "[A]s their sense of Hell and the fears
of damnation chills and cools, so their desires for Heaven and Salvation cool also. . . .[T]he
bottom of all is . . . want of a change in their minds and will." Fear is
powerful because it has the power to change the sinful mind and will. Fear has the power to create a
new man.

Donne expresses a similar respect for the spiritual utility of fear. In Meditation VI of
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, he observes the fear of his physician and reflects on
the emotion. "[L]et me not, O Lord," he prays, "go about to overcome the sense of
that fear, so
far as to pretermit the fitting and preparing of myself for the worst that may be feared, the
passage out of this life." Insofar as it inspires the Christian to turn to God, fear is vital:

The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; the secret, the mystery of the right use of fear. Dost thou not mean this when thou sayest, we shall understand the fear of the Lord? Have it, and benefit by it; have it, and stand under it; be directed by it, and not be dejected with it.[27]

Like Bunyan, Donne distinguishes the "right" fear from the ordinary feeling that produces
dejection. He considers the fear of God a "secret" and a "mystery" because its operation and
benefit may not be immediately apparent.

The sonnets in which Donne employs strategies to create holy fear focus on death,
judgment, or hell as he tries to feel the burden of sin or to experience fully his need to repent.
Powerful images are the Pauline striver's self-prescribed antidote to sin and indifference.
"Deaths herald" hales the soul and leads it off to execution; Death tears body and soul apart like
the separable parts of a joint, and the soul sees God's awesome face. The terrified poet and
Death run rapidly toward each other in one sonnet; in another, his soul and body must be burnt
with the "fiery zeale" of God. Elsewhere, numberless souls find their bodies on Judgment Day,
and in another poem "the worlds last night" leads to the bloody, frowning face of Christ. Such
images are obvious efforts to arouse emotion, and entirely appropriate to a sinner at the
beginning of his pilgrimage. Donne's declaration in "Oh, to vex me" that his best days are those
when he "shakes with feare," confesses that he needs to stimulate the terror that convicts him of
sin which, in turn, leads him to God.

In the Devotions, Donne declares that the fear and the love of God are finally
"inseparable."[28] "What if this present" is central among the sonnets of holy fear because it
shows Donne moving from fear to love. At the beginning, the poem goes swiftly from one
image or emotion to another:

What if this present were the worlds last night?
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Teares in his eyes quench the amasing light,
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell,
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray'd forgivenesse for his foes fierce spight?

To juxtapose divine justice and love, Donne immediately displaces the thought of the last
judgment with the disturbing, fearful face of redemption. The light in Christ's eyes is "amasing,"
and his agonized frowns are appropriate also to his role as the eternal judge. Remembering
"the worlds last night" from the perspective of the Crucifixion, Donne superimposes the divine
guise of judge on the savior; transformed by blood, tears, and forgiveness, Christ's frightening
features become the image of compassion.

The poet began his effort at reassurance by reminding himself that the picture of the
crucified Christ is in his heart. As Donne and his reader know, this is the place lovers
traditionally favor for the lady's portrait (witness "The Dampe" and "The Dreame"). Now this
hint of the soul closeted in the heart with its beloved's picture reminds the poet of other loves:

No, no; but as in my idolatrie
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is
A signe of rigour: so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd,
This beauteous form assures a pitious mind.

These lines achieve a remarkable density by being freighted, for the reader familiar with
Donne's other persona, with textual memories. To read only the words would be to half-read
the lines, missing the wealth of association that "idolatrie" immediately summons. Irresistibly,
the lines recall the "Songs and Sonets" -- the themes and flavor of the secular works as well as
the specific poems (like "The Canonization" or "Air and Angels") featuring religious diction.
The reader remembers what the poet remembers.

Donne's tone is rueful as he recalls his other mask of sensual lover, and his former
worship of false images. Nevertheless, the Pauline striver still uses the strategies perfected by
the profane lover. He comforts his anxious soul with the same reasoning he used to persuade
his mistress to "pitty," a strategy complicated for the reader by the awareness that truth was
never the point of the lover's palaver to his mistresses. But Donne does not lie to himself;
instead, he highlights the differences between idols and the true God, between sensual and
divine love, and between his past and present perspectives. The false idols of his past required
flattering persuasion to give the petitioner what he wanted. They could be lied to and, in fact,
their beauty or foulness depended on whether or not they gave what the worshipper sought.
On the cross, God gave sinners what they needed but could not ask for. The difference
between the earlier and the present lover is best indicated by his awareness that true beauty
belongs to God, whose "horrid" appearance on the cross expresses his love more clearly than
anything else could do.

"What if this present" portrays a rare instance in which Donne's former persona and his
present one merge. Instead of seeming to be imported into the sonnet, Donne's past persona
emerges subtly, from the image of Christ's picture hanging in his heart. Divine love reminds the
poet of sensual love which had once reminded him, and reminds him again, of divine love.
Though thinking of it saddens him, his former sin is not an impediment to his present
assurance -- far from it. His past is redeemed by his present understanding, but his present
understanding is also informed by his past. What the poet spoke of as coercive flattery in
human love is revealed as the truth of divine love: pity is the sign of beauty. The countenance of
the suffering Christ cannot "affright" the Christian because it is the image of love.

Like many of the Holy Sonnets, this poem emphasizes the poet's sense of sinful
imperfection and his fears. Donne seems still close enough to his idolatry that its forms of
petition and worship come naturally to mind when he approaches the true God. Of course, as
he realizes, many differences separate his past and present loves. One of these is the
desirability of fear in the context of eternal consequences, the holy fear that Donne considered
in the Devotions:

Many of the blessed martyrs have passed out of this life without any show of fear; but thy most blessed Son himself did not so. . . . Let me not therefore, O my God, be ashamed of these fears, but let me feel them to determine where his fear did, in a present submitting of all to thy will. And when thou shalt have . . . rectified my former presumptions and negligences with these fears, be pleased, O Lord, as one made so by thee, to think me fit for thee. [29]

Finally, the fear the poet cultivates in the Holy Sonnets is the way he cultivates his acceptability
to God in his developing spirituality. The Pauline striver works out his own salvation in fear and
trembling, knowing that "it is God which worketh in [him]" (Phil. 2:13) -- holy fear comes from
a loving God intent on correcting the sinner.

Of course the Holy Sonnets cannot reveal Donne's sincerity. But the poems can reveal
intention, to the extent that it can be inferred from his accomplishment; they can reveal the
persona he constructs.[30] Like his contemporaries, Donne thought of the self-projection he
presented in writing as his image or emblem. But whereas contemporary readers like Walton
equated the poems with the life, persona criticism does not look to the poet's life to explicate
the text or vice versa. It focuses, instead, on the composite mask that can be reconstructed
from the poems and interprets it as any other aspect of the text can be interpreted. From this
critical perspective, it is immaterial whether an infusion of grace or a practical impulse inspired
Donne to write the sonnets. One advantage of persona criticism as a strategy for biographical
interpretation is that it concerns itself in large part with recurring patterns in texts. One may
quarrel with the significance of those patterns, but the disagreement is about texts and not about
intangibles like the author's faith or frame of mind. Persona criticism attends to the
particularities of the author's life and career as well as to their social and cultural contexts. Its
praxis acknowledges that literary masks, no less than people, possess a cultural life; indeed,
some masks possess, as John Milton wrote about books, "a potency of life in them to be as
active as that soul whose progeny they are."

John Donne wrote the Holy Sonnets with a keen awareness of the "life beyond life"[31]
of his poetically-constructed personae. When he turned his hand to religious poetry, he could
not ignore the masks he had been constructing from the time he began writing and circulating
poems. Because he wrote for a circle familiar with his life and his achieved literary
identity -- with his masks -- he was compelled to reconceive his poetic persona and to situate it
in some relation to its predecessors. Sprinkled with provocative references to the sensual
amorist, the Holy Sonnets have as a major part of their project the creation of a plausible
stance for the erstwhile lover, satirist, and elegist. The pressure of what Donne had previously
circulated inspired a poetics of credibility consistent with his earlier self-representations. The
continuities between Donne's secular and sacred poems are such that no one could doubt that
he was the author of the Holy Sonnets. But the poet's typical strategies and his unmistakable
voice served to flesh out the new persona of the Pauline striver, a man whose questionable past
is not entirely past, a hard case who requires energetic self-talk and the deliberate arousal of
fear to inspire him to devotion.

Donne could not delete the lover or the occasionally coarse elegist from his coterie's
collective mind, but he could assume a mask that did not actively solicit disbelief. The Pauline
striver allows for moral inexactitude and a maximum of drama in the working out of salvation
with fear and trembling. In this endeavour, Donne's efforts of self-exhortation and the arousal
of fear are as creditable as tangible results. The Pauline striver, manifestly imperfect but
exerting himself, is Donne's early Christian persona, a model of the effort, energy, and
determination that he could muster to conform to the requirements of his master. A religion-oriented society preoccupied with spiritual development would have recognized this biblical
persona and appreciated Donne's affirmation of powerful and transformative faith.

Notes

1. R.C. Bald wrote that the Holy
Sonnets depicted a spiritual crisis from which Donne eventually emerged
as an assured Christian (235). John Carey thought that the same poems showed
Donne's pain in trying to conform to the Anglican religion (57).

2. See, for example, Stachniewski
(677-705); Young; Low (201-221). Cf. Dennis Flynn who rejects the idea of a
persona in a discussion of "To E. Of D." in order to
identify the recipient of the poem and to date its composition. See also
Richard Strier, who acknowledges his biographical assumption, however
briefly: "Sometimes the poetic speaker is the historical author, or is
a direct projection of him (or her)" (358).

3. Browne, "Jo. Mar.," and
Mayne are quoted in Smith (84-98). For discussion of the elegies on Donne's
death, see Gottlieb (23-38); and, especially for a discussion of Browne and
Walton, see Fallon (197-212).

Walker, Cheryl.“Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author.” Contesting
the Subject: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and
Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue UP, 1991.

Walton, Izaak. Life of Dr. John Donne. In Seventeenth-Century
Prose and Poetry. 1929. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963.
250-71.